I always did identify with Brian right down to having a very shitty experience in shop class (er, if anybody hasn’t seen the movie, Brian’s the character on the far left, not the far right!) 😉
In most professions, you try to learn all you can about a single area. One of the coolest things about librarians/librarianship is that it’s a profession where you benefit from knowing a little bit about a lot of things.
When I was a kid, I used to spend hours listening to my parent’s record collection. My dad was a big Elvis fan and passed that love of “The King” on to me via the various Elvis records he owned.
I used to argue with one of my best friends in school. He was a big Beatles fan and I was an Elvis fan so we’d debate who was better. (I relayed this story to Rory Allen and he made the very relevant point that Elvis became the biggest star in the world all by himself while the Beatles had four guys to rely on. Plus the Beatles would be the first to acknowledge they followed a path made by The King.)
When I was in high school, we took a family trip to Florida which included pilgrimages to Tupelo and Memphis to see the town where Elvis was born and the city where he lived most of his life.
Obviously getting to hang out with “Elvis” wasn’t the whole reason I wanted to book Rory Allen for my library’s 50th Anniversary Event – I knew he’d be a big, unique draw and make for a memorable experience that would be *very* different from a lot of library events.
But on some level, I did have selfish motives as well. It was pretty cool to think back to how much Elvis meant to my dad and me over the years. (One of my strongest childhood memories of listening to music is playing “American Trilogy” over and over to hear the lines:
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry
You know your daddy’s bound to die
But all my trials, Lord will soon be over.
I was maybe 8-9 years old at the time and that song, with those lines, blew my mind.
Unfortunately, dad wasn’t able to be at the event as he and my mom are at at family wedding in the States. But fortunately, Rory was kind enough to record a message for my dad…
Rory will be performing throughout the afternoon (and taking photos and signing autographs when he’s not performing), we’ll have a costume contest, retro snacks (featuring a popular food which was released in 1966 – the year Regent Place branch opened!), a couple of our public computers turned into pinball machines and much more.
It’s not very retro but in a nod to the role of technology in the modern library, we’re also going to have RPL’s 3D Printer (and 3D Printed giveaways for the first 50 people through the doors) plus we’re planning to drop Pokemon Lures every half hour on the hour throughout the afternoon.
On top of all that, I’ve got a blog exclusive!
I just found out that we’ll have at least one classic 1960’s car in the parking lot (we tried to get more but there’s a big show in Moose Jaw tomorrow unfortunately.)
Literally, based on buying contributors a “cup of coffee” (eg. donations), many people can’t seem to believe the images are free, being released under a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license which is essentially the same as making them “public domain” under conventional understanding of copyright.
If you work for a library (where our entire business model is based on essentially putting material that would otherwise be considered copyrighted freely available into the public domain), it’s great to see sites like this making useful information available for free to anyone who wants it.
I’m always interested in the concept of generational differences which has come up a couple times recently – after Shea attended a workshop on reaching out to young people in the workplace and then during a conversation in my workplace where a few of us “oldies” had fun explaining what life was like in the time of cassette tapes and the allure of Vanilla Ice to a young Millennial/recent University grad.
